The latest offspring of revolutionary opinion--and the most misshapen--is anarchism. Seven or eight years ago the word was scarcely known; but then, as if on a sudden, rumours of the anarchists and their horrid "propaganda of deed" echoed in, one upon another, from almost every country in the old world and the new. To-day they were haranguing mobs of unemployed in Lyons and Brussels under a black flag--the black flag of hunger, which, they explained, knows no law. To-morrow they were goading the peasants of Lombardy or Naples to attack the country houses of the gentry, and lay the vineyards waste. Presently they were found attempting to assassinate the German Emperor at Niederwald, or laying dynamite against the Federal Palace at Bern; or a troop of them had set off over Europe on a quixotic expedition of miscellaneous revenge on powers that be, and were reported successively as having killed a _gendarme_ in Strasburg, a policeman in Vienna, and a head of the constabulary in Frankfort. Before these reports had time to die in our ears, fresh tales would arrive of anarchists pillaging the bakers' shops in Paris, or exulting over the murder of a mining manager at Decazeville, or flinging bombs among the police of Chicago; and it seemed as if a new party of disorder had broke loose upon the world, busier and more barbarous than any that went before it. It is no new party, however; it is merely the extremer element in the modern socialist movement. Mr. Hyndman and other socialists would fain disclaim the anarchists altogether, and are fond of declaring that they are the very opposite of socialists--that they are individualists of the boldest stamp. But this contention will not stand. There are individualist anarchists, no doubt. The anarchists of Boston, in America, are individualists; one of the two groups of English anarchists in London is individualist; but these individualist anarchists are very few in number anywhere, and the mass of the party whose deeds made a stir on both sides of the Atlantic is undoubtedly more socialist than the socialists themselves. I have said in a previous chapter that the socialism of the present day may be correctly described in three words as Revolutionary Socialist Democracy, and in every one of these three characteristics the anarchists go beyond other socialists, instead of falling short of them. They are really more socialist, more democratic, and more revolutionary than the rest of their comrades. They are more socialist, because they are disposed to want not only common property and common production, but common enjoyment of products as well. They are more democratic, because they will have no government of any kind over the people except the people themselves--no king or committee, no representative institutions, either imperial or local, but merely every little industrial group of people managing its public affairs as it will manage its industrial work. And they are more revolutionary, for they